The Serpent and the Pearl

  She looked at me. “That’s truly why you did it?”

  “Perhaps I was also making amends.” I gazed up at the arched ceiling of the vestry again. A spider was spinning a web there, not caring about the little man lying below and possibly dying. “I am sorry I called you a whore, Madonna Giulia. In Pesaro.” I hate making apologies, and I fumbled the words. I hate fumbling, too. “When I get in a temper—I need to cut someone, even if only with my tongue. You were there.”

  “And you were right.” She was quite calm. “I am a whore. I used to pretend I wasn’t, because I never asked for presents or payments, and I never asked to be anybody’s mistress in the first place. But after a while it doesn’t matter what you ask, does it?” She looked down at herself, all the gaudy jewels and the low-cut silver gown. “Don’t I look like the most expensive harlot in Rome?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “No need to defend my honor, Leonello.” Her tone was light, social. Talking of anything, I suppose, as long as she could distract me from the pain in my body. “I’m a whore now, and I’ll play the part for the French. But I won’t always be one. This summer with my family . . . it showed me something.”

  “Which is?” I raised an eyebrow. Even that hurt. “The idyllic pleasures of Carbognano, as painted by your good lord husband?”

  “Yes.” Giulia reached to a table behind the brazier and uncorked a flask of wine. “Someday I’ll have that. An ordinary life again.”

  “Do you want such a life?”

  “Someday. Even if it comes with Orsino.”

  “He’s not so terrible,” I found myself saying.

  “No,” Giulia acknowledged. “But he’s gutless. You were right about that.”

  “He loves you,” I found myself saying. How had I found myself speaking of love with the most expensive harlot in Rome? Dio, but I wanted a drink.

  “Orsino doesn’t love me.” She poured me a cup as though she had read my mind, helping lift my head so I could sip without spilling. “If he did, he’d spit in Rodrigo’s eye and say he’d rather be excommunicated and damned than give me up. He’d hear I was being held captive by the French, and he’d come riding to rescue me.” Giulia shook her head. “I don’t think I inspire much love in men. Just passion, and the passion isn’t really for me.” She made a matter-of-fact gesture at her own face, her golden hair, her perfumed breasts. “The passion is for this.”

  “The Pope will harrow heaven and hell to get you back safely,” I said. “Isn’t that love?”

  “More passion.” She held the cup to my lips again; rearranged my blankets. “One day it will fade, and he’ll tire of me, and I’ll go back to my gutless husband. I’m not so afraid of that happening as I used to be, oddly.” A shrug. “You know why silly women moon over Petrarch and Dante, Leonello?”

  “Why?”

  “Because we like to pretend that we’re Laura or Beatrice. Women who inspire both passion and love, and in verse too.” Giulia’s tone turned wry. “But women like me aren’t idols for poets. Laura and Beatrice were both chaste—no one writes poetry to harlots.”

  “Count yourself fortunate,” I said. “Great love makes for terrible poetry. Remember Lord Sforza’s unspeakable little sonnets about Lucrezia? ‘Hail to thee, O springtime goddess fair—’”

  Giulia let out a laugh, and I thought a genuine one. It did my heart good to hear it. “Don’t think I’m complaining too much about this life of mine, Leonello. Passion is more than most women get, after all. And His Holiness is burning hot enough for me right now to challenge all France, and that’s more than Orsino would ever do.”

  I had no answer to that.

  My mistress arranged the blankets closer around me and rose. “Until His Holiness sends an offer of ransom, however, I’d better go dine with General d’Allegre and do my best to keep us all safe and sound.” A sigh as she gave a pat to her hair and her gleaming skirts, and arranged her huge pearl more prominently between her breasts. “Holy Virgin, but it’s bound to be unpleasant.”

  I felt cold despite the blankets and the brazier. “Surely the general wouldn’t lay a finger on a prisoner.” Leaving me to die of my wounds was one thing; a dwarf guard was nothing. But the Pope’s darling—

  “I’ll encourage him to lay a finger on me, Leonello,” Giulia said quietly. “The whole hand, if he wants. If it will keep my daughter safe and my maids unraped, and get a surgeon in here to keep you from bleeding to death, I’ll let that French general lift my skirts and ride me like a mare.”

  She glided from the vestry like an actress making her way onto the stage.

  I heard Pantisilea’s voice from the corner, cautious. “She told me to look after you, Leonello. I could get you some food—”

  I shut my eyes. “Get out.”

  The vestry door thudded again, leaving me in the silence. I took a ragged bubbling breath and spat blood again. My hand throbbed like it was being crushed in a vise, and the wound in my hip had broken open under the bandages and soaked the bedclothes beneath me. At least I hoped it was blood. From the smell, I was very much afraid I had pissed myself. Piss and blood and rage; the room stank of it—and for what? I’d been hired to keep the Pope’s mistress safe from danger, and I’d given my pathetic stunted body over to do it, and I’d still failed. She’d go play whore to the French and I’d lie here and die, and none of it mattered at all.

  Failed. Failed.

  Since I was alone, I let out one gasping sob between clenched teeth, cradling my maimed hand against my chest. Dio, but it hurt. I’d never known anything could hurt so much.

  “Leonello, let me help—”

  Carmelina Mangano’s Venetian accents came from the door as it creaked open again. Quick footsteps sounded, and then I felt her wiry arm sliding under my head, raising me up so I could breathe easier. I hurt too badly to refuse the help, and resentment stung my mouth. How dare she offer it when I couldn’t fling it in her face?

  “Here, take some wine.” She propped me up halfway so I was almost sitting, then went racing about the vestry poking up the brazier and uncorking the flask again. How she had so much energy at the end of the day we’d just endured, I didn’t know. It was all I could do to take a few shallow breaths around my bubbling lungs and get my face under control again. My flattened little finger had begun to throb on an entirely different level from the rest of my mangled hand, pain sinking in like a ring of teeth.

  “I think I’ll have some wine too,” Carmelina said over her bony shoulder, rummaging for another cup. “Madonna Giulia told us all to try to sleep while she was gone wining and dining the French officers. But I don’t think any of us maidservants can even close our eyes, not after the things we’ve heard the French sentries call in at us.” A shudder.

  I looked up at her as she passed me a wine cup. “Thank you.”

  Her eyes flicked away. That bruise along the side of her face was nearly as spectacular as mine. On top of the bruising she had shadows of exhaustion under her eyes, and her wiry black curls had escaped their plait and bobbed at the middle of her back. Grown out to a respectable length now, that hair.

  “Do you want something to eat?” She tugged at a straying thread on her sleeve. “The French gave us some provisions, and I’ve still got the remains of a nice zabaglione from Bartolomeo’s hamper—”

  “I’m not hungry.” I managed to wrap my broken fingers around the cup, feeling the joints grind as though filled with molten-hot sand. “Besides, I don’t think I’ll live long enough to digest your zabaglione.”

  She winced, looking at the bulky lumps of my bandages under the blankets. “Is it so bad?”

  “No, it’s marvelous.” I made a flamboyant gesture at my bruises, my bandages, the air around me that smelled so rank. I had definitely pissed myself. “Better than a massage, a hot bath, and a soft bed with Giulia Farnese in it, all rolled into one.” I drained half the cup of wine. I drank sparingly most nights, but a dying man has his privileges. “Good vintage. That pale wine from C
hiarello?”

  “Yes, I uncorked the best wine we had before the French found it and stole it.” She tossed down a great gulp. “I’d say we’ve earned it.”

  “I have, anyway.” I managed to lift the flagon, topping up my cup. I felt rage kindling deep in my torn chest, and I nurtured it like a small flame. Rage felt much better than pain. “You, Signorina Cuoca, have much to answer for.”

  Her voice was wary. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s your fault we traveled the Montefiascone road into the hands of the French. I was standing guard outside Madonna Giulia’s chamber the night before we left Capodimonte. You brought her a plate of biscotti, and you trotted out some pretty story about a man giving you that bruise on your face”—I gestured—“and asked if we couldn’t travel a different way, just to avoid him and his party.”

  “It’s true. I was attacked.” Her voice rose. “I didn’t know the French would be along the other road. How could I?”

  “Oh, I believe that. Just not the part about you being attacked. Madonna Giulia, she’s a trusting soul, so perhaps she swallowed that story, but not me. I’ve seen you handle a cleaver, Carmelina. If a man tried to pry those long legs of yours apart without your permission, you’d run him off with a knife and then spit on him the next morning. Not go fleeing up the opposite road in a panic.” I contemplated the ceiling and whistled. “I like that about you, really. If I were in any condition for it, I’d challenge you to a knife-throwing contest, get you drunk, and try to coax those legs apart myself. There’s a certain height difference, but it’s surprising how that goes away once one is lying down.”

  “You’re drunk,” Carmelina snapped. But her eyes were wide in that thin bruised face, and I felt a vicious satisfaction.

  “It was that party of Venetians who stopped for the night, wasn’t it? I suppose you ran into someone who knew you. Cousin, brother. Maybe the Archbishop himself—tell me, did he know you from your convent?”

  She went perfectly still then. The flickering light from the brazier threw a shadow off her high-bridged nose. Somewhere outside the vestry I heard a maidservant weeping, and Madonna Adriana hushing her.

  “You’re wrong,” Carmelina Mangano said at last. Her voice had a rusty scrape like an old wheel. “You’re wrong, I never—”

  “Spare me,” I said contemptuously. “The chopped hair? The way you avoid churches? The way you have no proper education but know all the prayers whenever any visiting cardinal starts spouting in Latin? You might call yourself a cook, but you swapped that cook’s apron with a nun’s veil. Some convent in Venice, I suppose, where your family disposed of their spare daughter. The one too plain and sharp-tongued to get a husband even if she does cook like an angel.” I stared her down. “You’re a nun, Carmelina. You ran away, and if you’re caught you’ll be hauled back and subjected to the bread-and-water penance by your abbess, and never allowed to cook anything again but watery communal stews.”

  “No.” She shook her head, a frantic little jerk back and forth, back and forth. “No, I—”

  “I’ve known for months. Why do you think I stopped baiting you? There wasn’t any point; I’d already figured it out. I wouldn’t have bothered to say anything, except that it’s your fault I hurt like this.” I threw the empty cup at her, with a gasp of pain for the stab that shot through my side. “You were so petrified of being hauled back to your convent that you threw us all into the hands of the French. Three guards murdered, half the bones in my body cracked like green sticks, and Giulia spreading her legs for the French general right now, just to keep us all safe. Congratulations on your fine escape.”

  “I didn’t know the French army was on that road! I didn’t know!”

  “Perhaps not, but I don’t feel very forgiving at the moment. I’m still lying here dying, you see.” Getting drunk had lost its appeal. I shoved at my pillows, struggling to lie flat again. “So now I know your secret, Signorina Cuoca. Or shall I call you Suora Carmelina?”

  She gasped, and I felt a surge of savage satisfaction. I raised an eyebrow at her as I drew my blankets up to my chest. “Think on this,” I said. “I’m probably going to die in this bed. But if I don’t, and if we get back to Rome, I will turn you in and happily watch you get hauled off in chains back to your convent.”

  She stared at me.

  I saluted her with my right hand, the one with the broken fingers. “Good night.”

  Carmelina

  Signorina?” Bartolomeo’s head jerked up as I stumbled out of the vestry. He had been praying with that quiet surety of his, lips moving soundlessly as he gripped the little wooden crucifix about his neck in one freckled fist, but now he stared at me. “What’s wrong, signorina?”

  “What’s wrong?” I looked around our huddled little party of maidservants and guardsmen, slumped in shock and exhaustion against the stone walls. “What’s right, Bartolomeo? Tell me that!”

  “Eat something,” my apprentice said helplessly. “You should eat, signorina.”

  “That’s your solution? Food?” All the strength had left my legs; I melted down to sit beside him on the floor. “You really are a cook, Bartolomeo.”

  His freckled face glowed. At least someone could find a ray of light in this black hell we were trapped in.

  Because of me.

  My hands doubled into fists, but they still shook. My head was one great mindless yammer of words; two words over and over. He knows. He knows, he knows, he knows. That malicious little man dying in the next room. Torn half to pieces, but still tearing me to pieces.

  Suora Carmelina. Only half right, really. Suora Serafina was the name I’d been given, when I knelt on a stone floor in smoldering resentment and took my vows in the Convent of Santa Marta as a nun.

  He knows, he knows, he knows. Though he didn’t know how truly he had the power to destroy me. He’d report me only as a runaway nun, and for the most part runaway nuns were simply handed back to their convents for whatever private punishment their superiors deemed fit. But if I was exposed as a nun run from her convent, it would soon be known what convent—because if inquiries were made around Venice, the story would surely surface of the lay sister who had robbed her order of a relic, not just any relic but their patron saint’s hand, and then fled. Desecrators faced a gruesome enough punishment: hanging upside-down on a public gallows as the crowds jeered and threw stones. But as a desecrator who was also a nun, I’d be returned to Venice to face a far worse fate.

  “Signorina?” Bartolomeo ventured at my side.

  I turned and buried my face in my apprentice’s shoulder, winding my cold hand into his sleeve. A maestro di cucina should never show weakness before underlings, but I wasn’t a maestro di cucina. I was a fraud. They called Giulia Farnese the Bride of Christ, but I was a true Bride of Christ, and there would be no forgiveness for any of my sins. Nuns were never forgiven; their misdeeds were counted twice as black because their souls belonged to God and must therefore be stainless. If a nun turned her back on her convent, she turned her back on God Himself. If a nun took a man to her bed, she committed adultery against God Himself. The punishment for a nun’s sins would always be crueler—and my spiteful prioress from the Convent of Santa Marta, with her velvety voice and her highborn connections into all the powerful families of Venice, would see to it I suffered the worst possible punishment offered for altar desecration.

  She’d make sure I had my hands and my nose chopped off.

  Maybe after that I’d be strung upside-down on a gallows to die, or maybe I’d simply be returned to my convent, but it wouldn’t matter. If I had no hands to stir and chop, no nose to smell, I’d never cook again. I’d had a long time to consider that fate, after I fled my veil and my convent walls. Maybe it was foolish of me to think so, but I knew I’d rather be dead than a noseless, stump-fisted horror.

  My eyes stung; I was shaking all over, and I didn’t protest when my apprentice put a hesitant arm about my shoulders.

  “We’ll be all right,
Carmelina,” Bartolomeo said, and I didn’t protest when he called me by name, either.

  Pantisilea had gone into the vestry with a tray, and now she came back out shaking her head over the untouched food. “Leonello won’t eat,” she said. “And he’s spitting up blood again—I’ve got his wounds bandaged, but it’s inside where he’s bleeding.”

  One of the guards said it, brutally. “He’s dying.”

  Not fast enough, I thought. I’d never in my life prayed for a man to die, but I was praying now. Die, you spiteful little bastard. Just die and take my secret with you.

  “If Madonna Giulia can just get him a surgeon—” Pantisilea gnawed her lip. “Do you really think she’ll have to—that nasty French general . . .”

  Adriana da Mila spoke bleakly into little Laura’s curls. “If she does, the Pope will never hear about it from me.”

  I flinched. The yammer of words in my head changed, from He knows to My fault. My fault, my fault, my fault.

  “She’d better get that surgeon soon.” Pantisilea dashed at her eyes. “He’s trying so hard not to cry at the pain, he’s got me crying. That much pain for such a little man, it’s like to kill him.”

  I hoped it did kill him. It was him or me—perhaps it had always been him or me, since the day we met.

  We all lapsed into silence again. Bartolomeo’s arm still circled my shoulders, but I felt too frightened and exhausted to shrug it away. I wanted to howl and scream and hide, like a child afraid of the dark, but there was no hiding from this. He knows, he knows, he knows.

  Bartolomeo kept trying to press food on me, rummaging in the hamper. Napkins piled up, cheeses and bread loaves, cold sliced meats, spoons, twists of dried herbs, the little stoppered vial of hemlock tincture that I kept to kill rats. My eyes fell on the vial.

  “Have you got more wine, Bartolomeo?” Pantisilea joined my apprentice, rummaging in the hamper. “If we haven’t got a surgeon yet for poor Leonello, at least I can get him drunk and numb the pain a little.”